Walking the walk: What measuring gait can teach us about health

What measuring gait can teach us about health

Is there a stranger sport than Olympic race walking? With the London Summer Games in full gear now, it seems timely to consider this most unusual of athletic pursuits. With their hip-swinging heel-toe bustle, walking athletes are required to keep part of one foot touching the ground at all times. A leap from foot to foot would be a run — and could cause disqualification. The pursuit’s version of a sprint is 20 kilometres long, and the world-record holder, Russia’s Vladimir Kanaykin, crossed that distance in one hour, 17 minutes and 16 seconds — giving him an average gait speed of about 4.3 metres per second.

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Gait speed is important to more than race-walkers, however. What does your walking speed say about you? And, more saliently, what does it reveal about your health?

You can tell a lot about people from the way they walk. I remember as a med student doing an elective course in obstetrics and gynecology in Barbados. For my first day of work at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown, I dressed in a tie and began hustling through my rounds, same as I might have in Canada. I’ll never forget my coworkers’ reactions. One of the residents said to me, in as alarmed a tone as he could muster: “Why you walking so fast, mon? You walking like you still in the city — slow down! And lose the tie!

That was a moment my walk betrayed me as a newcomer, a foreigner not yet versed in the ways of a laid-back island culture. While that experience was more about the cultural implications of walking and personality, walking can also have medical implications, too.

For example, doctors examine the characteristics of gait for patients suspected of the neurodegenerative disorder Parkinson’s disease, because those who have it display a short-stepped, shuffling walk. At rest, the Parkinson’s patient has a resting pill-rolling tremor in the hands — which goes away when the patient begins to walk. Other forms of gait and imbalance can provide clinical clues on a variety of diseases.

In July, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a study that showed that researchers can predict which elderly adults are most at risk for the ill effects of hypertension by monitoring gait speed. Do you walk fast and have high blood pressure? You’re at greater risk of mortality compared to slow walkers with high blood pressure. Another interesting article, published in the Journal of Gerontology in 2009, established that some people — about 17% — tend to experience three symptoms together: decreases in mood, cognitive performance and gait speed. Further, the researchers found that all three symptoms tended to be associated with higher systolic blood pressure — leading them to wonder whether the higher pressure is somehow burning out circuitry in the frontal subcortical regions of the brain, which is involved in managing all three symptoms.

More intriguing to the average person is a large study that appeared last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Its analysis of gait speed and longevity in 34,485 community-dwelling adults aged 65 and older established that longevity was proportional to average walking speed. In other words, elderly people who tended to walk faster tended to live longer. Perhaps that doesn’t seem the most revolutionary of conclusions. After all, we tend to assume that a briskly moving 80-year-old is in better health than one who inches along a sidewalk. What’s interesting is how detailed these researchers went with their analysis — and how neatly walking speed functioned as a yardstick for a person’s overall health. “Gait speed could be considered a simple and accessible summary indicator of vitality,” researchers wrote, “because it integrates known and unrecognized disturbances in multiple organ systems, many of which affect survival.”

Simplicity is also crucial here; the researchers postulated the assessment could be performed with little more than a willing subject, a four-metre runway and a stopwatch. People with a normal walking speed faster than that tended to live longer than average compared to their peers. Slow walkers (below 0.6 m/s) had a risk of earlier mortality and the study also suggested that a better-than-average life expectancy may be associated with fast walkers above 1.2 m/s, but additional research is required.
So as we all become immersed in the world’s largest sporting event, take a moment to consider the race-walkers, and the marvellous manner in which we move from point A to point B. We don’t often consider the way we walk. But when something goes amiss with our bodies, our walk is certain to betray it — even if we don’t notice it ourselves. Gait speed is a great thing for Olympic athletes—and a great indicator of our overall health.